MUSIC REVIEW; Wandering Through a Recluse's Personal Garden

Elizabeth Farnum's song recital at Merkin Hall on Thursday evening included pieces decades old that had never been performed before. The evening's subject was the music of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, the British composer of Parsi origin, who in his late 30's set a ban on performances of his music but went on writing copious compositions -- and furious letters -- for more than half a century.

He relaxed his embargo shortly before his death in at 96 1988, and since then his music has been steadily gaining admirers. Until now, though, attention has been almost exclusively on his abundant output for the piano. The songs were terra incognita until Ms. Farnum explored them for this recital and for a recording she has made with the same excellent airy-toned and alacritous pianist, Margaret Kampmeier.

In terms of style and creative progress, these songs turn out to tell a story similar to that told by Sorabji's piano music. Here was a young man who, at the time of World War I, found his way into a garden of dappled textures, tendrilous extensions and rich harmonies, then locked the gate and let everything grow.

Sorabji's preference was for French poetry, particularly that of Baudelaire and Verlaine, whose words suited his verdant, rapturous style, his sly irony and his closeness to another musical Francophile, Szymanowski. The earlier settings tend to be either outbursts of rapture growing in wavelike patterns of mounting intensity to climax near the end, or else, where most of the Verlaine poems are concerned, pieces at once deliciously fine and self-mocking.

In both cases they play explicitly toward an audience. But ''Trois Poèmes,'' which Sorabji wrote in 1941, a decade into his seclusion, leap at once into feverish moods backed by wild keyboard writing, which Ms. Kampmeier here expressed as hectic opalescence.

Ms. Farnum responded with characteristic warmth and confidence to the tone of all the songs, though music so harmonically complex needed a tighter focus on pitch.